Eight of the nation’s largest technology companies sent the lobbying boys around to President Barrack Obama’s place in a bid to get him to call off his surveillance hounds. They face an uphill battle. US officials are confident that the American people are too busy watching reality TV cake icing programmes to care about surveillance. If anyone objects, they can be silenced by stories about how terrorists or paedophiles are going to eat their rather overweight children.

However, the tech companies are uncommonly unified. Google and Microsoft are working with Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, AOL and Twitter. If you put that lot in a room together, they would normally be calling each other names. In this case, they are working together and pooling their lobbying dosh so they might be able to change someone’s mind.

In a letter to U.S. leaders published in several newspapers, the coalition calls for an end to bulk collection of user information and for the enactment of significant new protections when courts consider specific surveillance requests.

“We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But this summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide,” the letter says. “The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish.”

The proposals include a call for strong judicial oversight and an adversarial process for surveillance requests, including at the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. So far, the US has only seen a backlash against its antics in Europe and in Brazil, but local voters seem rather calm about it. Many of do not actually know where Europe and Brazil are, which probably helps.

The New York Times claims that the development of the US surveillance state goes a long way back into US history. In 1862, after President Abraham Lincoln appointed him secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton penned a letter to the president requesting sweeping powers.Central to these powers were getting total control of the telegraph lines.

The idea was that by routing those lines through his office, Stanton would keep tabs on vast amounts of communication, journalistic, governmental and personal. At the time the telegraph was the Internet of its day and while the traffic was lighter, the fact that it was rerouted through a centralised office is pretty much how Prism works.

On the back of Stanton’s letter Lincoln scribbled his approval: “The Secretary of War has my authority to exercise his discretion in the matter within mentioned.” Stanton’s next move was to arrest dozens of newspapermen arrested on questionable charges. A reporter for The New York Herald, who had insisted that he be given news ahead of other reporters, was arrested as a spy.

Stanton’s office made his department the nexus of war information. He collected news from generals, telegraph operators and reporters. He used his power over the telegraphs to influence what journalists did or didn’t publish. It was not until 1862, the House Judiciary Committee looked at the question of “telegraphic censorship” and called for restraint.

But the sequence is pretty much history repeating itself. Use the justification of a war to centralise the information, spy on citizens, arrest the journalists or brand them traitors. The only down side is that a war on terror is always endless, whereas the civil war did eventually stop – well not in Alabama of course.

Software giant, Microsoft has patented a machine that can monitor the behavior of employees while also assigning positive or negative scores to everything they do.

According to GeekWire, the patent send the IT department a flag when someone who repeatedly cuts off colleagues during conversations, or warns when a supervisor who repeatedly bugs underlings during their lunch break. Such scoring would presumably rely upon subjective criteria set by the employer regarding what counts as “good” or “bad” work habits.

The range of possible monitored behaviours includes word phrases, body gestures, and mannerisms “such as wearing dark glasses in a video conference” or “wearing unacceptable clothing to a business meeting”. If Microsoft’s idea is adopted then workplace surveillance another step forward by creating software capable of analysing those human behaviours.

The idea is that workers might benefit from such monitoring software by getting feedback about their behaviour. In our experience workers want to be left alone and it is not helpful to point out what people do wrong.

German gamers are up in arms over the Electronic Arts Origin end-user licensing agreement, which they believe gives EA the ability to spy on players. The terms seem to allow EA to access other EA products that are installed on the user’s system without letting the user know.

In addition, the information accessed apparently can be tied to the individual user and can be used for targeted marketing purposes. EA can also apparently share data that does not identify the user with third party service providers.

EA denies that Origin is spyware and they claim that they do not install spyware on the PCs of users that buy their products. They also claim that Origin has no access to anything other than stuff related to Origin and EA software, that the software has no access to a user’s personal files or documents.

EA claims that the license agreement is in line with industry standards and accepted industry privacy policies. Still, users seem worried, which isn’t good for EA.

The UK's reputation for spying on its citizens has just got worse after the police admitted that one in four Brits are on the police central database, despite most of them never committing a crime.

More than 12,000 users from Britain’s police forces and law enforcement agencies will share intelligence on criminals, suspects and those with criminal links when the Police National Database (PND) goes live next week. Civil liberties campaigners are concerned that people with no criminal connections are included on the £75million PND database.

The database was built after the 2002 murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, Cambridgeshire. It is being updated by all 43 forces in England and Wales, the eight forces in Scotland, the British Transport Police and the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

More than 15million people will be on the database and 6million will have a criminal conviction. Others will be victims, suspects, or mates of criminals.

The idea is that it would stop murderers like Soham killer Ian Huntley, slipping through the net when he moved from Humberside to Cambridgeshire and got a job as a school caretaker and committed further crimes.

You know the scenario – starting of righteous, ending up a tin-hatted man. The man behind whistleblowing site Wikileaks has now dubbed Facebook “the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.”

Assange said that the social networking site is the most comprehensive database containing people’s relationships, addresses, locations, communications, etc. He argued that the data is in the US and thus directly accessible to US intelligence.

Assange said:”Facebook, Google, Yahoo, all these major U.S. organizations have built-in interfaces for U.S. intelligence". He pointed out that the US intelligence is not actually running Facebook but that every time you add friends, you’re doing their work for free by building a database.

Of course, Assange forgets to note that most of these pieces of the Man’s database are as irrelevant as they get. Seriously, 1,285 profile pictures of yourself is not something the US intelligence is dying to rummage through.

An Illinois man pleaded not guilty today to taking restricted military data from his former job at a New Jersey technology company and presenting it at two conferences in China.

Sixing Liu worked for L-3 Communication he is charged with exporting defence-related data without a license and lying to authorities. He could get 20 years and currently coppers are trying to keep him locked up before his trial.

Liu was arrested last month and initially was granted bail by a federal judge in Chicago. The government opposed his release and a judge ordered him held in New Jersey on $750,000 bail.

Liu's defense attorney, Valerie Wong, is trying to get him released. According to Wong and information in court filings, Liu is a legal permanent resident of the U.S. who has lived in this country since 1993 after earning a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in China.

Coppers claim that Liu took a laptop to conferences in Chongqing and Shanghai last fall. While there, he allegedly gave presentations that described the technology he was working on. This breached all sorts of US laws.

Computer maker Pegatron Technology is suing a former employee, claiming that he, or she, leaked trade secrets to Asustek Computer. According to Digitimes, it is not clear who the former employee was, but strangely the outfit has not decided to take its chum Asustek to the cleaners.

One would think if you thought that someone had been leaking information to your rival, suing the rival for its complicity in the matter would be fairly logical. However, Pegatron was once a wholly-owned subsidiary of Asustek, and if it sued them then that would harm the two outfit’s lucrative business relationship.

Although no one knows what secrets were involved nor who the corporate spy was. All that was certain was that the information was related to Pegatron's notebook products. The employee who did the spying was told to clear out his or her desk and was escorted from the premises.